Colin Gleadell keeps score on the Contemporary art sales in London like no other observer. He revealed in his Telegraph column that three of the works sold at Christie’s that had been owned by Charles Saatchi were bought by one American collector:
Chris Ofili’s glittering Orgena, propped up on balls of elephant dung, had been shown in his Turner Prize- winning exhibition in 1998, and doubled his previous record, selling to an American collector for £1.9 million. Whoever said the Tate had overpaid when it bought Ofili’s The Upper Room installation of 13 paintings for £700,000? The same collector paid a record £241,250 for Jake and Dinos Chapman’s sculpture of Stephen Hawking, Ubermensch, which had been in the Sensation exhibition, as well as £1.4 million for another Sensation exhibit, Glenn Brown’s Dalí-Christ, doubling the minimum estimate for the picture.
Art Sales: Fortunes Smile on the Best of British (Telegraph)